A certain stock kind of villain, the Evil Chef is just that. They're cooks who are deliberately evil, but it doesn't quite matter how exactly they're trying to achieve that goal, just that their primary role is as a chef/cook. They may or may not be using their cooking skills to attempt to defeat the heroes, or they may just have the chef characteristics as something completely unconnected to their evil plans. They usually come in one of two types, the French chef type with a very much pointy mustache and the 'school canteen chef'.

Not to be confused with Lethal Chef, as characters listed on that page are not always evil, and nor are the characters listed here always actually bad at cooking. This is for evil/killer cooks that cause death and destruction, often by their cooking (and deliberately) while Lethal Chef is for people who cannot cook that often accidentally cause various effects by just how bad their cooking is. They make great villains because they work with lots of different types of big knives and various things easily converted to weapons (frying pans, rolling pins, meat tenderizers...).

Also has about a 50% chance of being a case of The Pirates Who Don't Do Anything, in that many of these characters may not actually be shown to cook in the story. In stories in which the main characters are animals, they of course run the risk of being edible; in this case the Evil Chef is less nastily evil, since he's just doing his job, but is still very threatening.

Today's theme ingredient is... You! The heat will be on! May overlap with the Chef of Iron, if the Evil Chef fights his or her enemies using cooking implements as weapons or such like. Also see I Ate WHAT?, Stab the Salad. Most rivals in a Cooking Duel are merely an Opposing Sports Team, who may not even be negatively characterized; but there can obviously be an incentive to make such a character into an actually evil enemy.

The Batman Adventures #16 saw The Joker kidnap an aspiring cartoonist and force him to illustrate his exploits for a series of comic books. One of his capers involved infiltrating a banquet and (while "disguised" in a toque and a white smock) slipping paralytic Joker venom into the diners' soup. ("Poisonous? That would be the poison. It complements the cilantro nicely, don't you think?") The poison didn't actually kill anyone who took a slurp of the soup, but it did leave them compulsively grinning - and paralyzed long enough for Joker to saunter right up to all them and beat them senseless with a large mallet. (And, of course, Joker being who he is, he did this all For the Evulz - and in this case also for publicity.)

Films — Live-Action

In the Pusher trilogy, Milo the Serbian druglord. He fancies himself a great cook, and tries to feed people his creations, but they're not very good. In fact, he accidentally gives all his thugs food poisoning in the third film, leaving him rather defenseless to a brewing gang war.

Pamela Voorhees of the original Friday the 13th (1980) was the cook of Camp Crystal Lake. Her villainy was in no way related to her cooking though, but involved knifing, axing, and occasionally arrowing people to death in revenge for her son, who drowned in Crystal Lake because the counselors who were supposed to be watching him were getting it on instead.

The slasher film The Cook, where there's something a little off about the new foreign chef hired to work at a sorority house.

Faquarl from The Bartimaeus Trilogy can transform into any shape he chooses, but is inexplicably fond of taking the form of a meat-cleaver wielding chef. Bartimaeus recalls that he's been doing this since they met in Babylon, circa 700 BC. It has something to do with all the sharp objects just lying around in kitchens.

Harry Kressing's novel The Cook features the mysterious Conrad, who uses his cooking skills to win over and then control his victims.

A Song of Ice and Fire has the ghost story of the Rat Cook of the Nightfort, who chopped up a visiting prince and fed him to his father in a pie. For breaking Sacred Hospitality, the gods turned him into a giant albino rat who eats his young.

Seinfeld's Soup Nazi? Well, not so much evil as oppressive to customers...

Also, in "The Pie", the man who George competes with for the suit is revealed to be a chef at the end, and attempts to poison him with a piece of pie.

Shockeye, from the Doctor Who serial "The Two Doctors". He's obsessed with finding out what things taste like, up to and including human beings, and "tenderises" one of the Doctor's companions - ignoring all the screaming as being completely irrelevant.

Large Fry in Wario Land, a giant Cheep Cheep who happens to be one of the occasional Flunky Bosses who happen to be quite strong on their own (which is extremely annoying, since he never stops calling down his buddies. Ever).

Chef Kawasaki was one of these in the Kirby games, but not so much in the anime.

The Tales Series has the Wonder Chef who is good and will teach the party recipes (effects vary by game, but are usually along the lines of post-battle healing), but Tales of Symphonia had a short sidequest involving the Wonder Chef's arch-nemesis- the evil Dark Chef.

The main villain of Octodad is a sushi chef who's the only one to realize that the protagonist is an octopus masquerading as a human and believes him to be a sleeper agent for the inevitable fish uprising.

Umami of Ōkamiden is Orochi's head chef. At least until Charity was kidnapped and forced into the job. Instead of hatching a plan to help her escape and reclaim her position as head chef, she finds it more beneficial to cook her.

The Black Dragon Group from Suikoden II. Their leader Jinkai plans to use the Moon Bird Recipe for some sort of world domination plan through cooking. Though by the end of the Cook-Off minigames, he got better and was implied to have mended his ways.

Don Doko Don has a few enemies of this sort in the food-themed world, including ones that throw exploding cupcakes or candies.

Western Animation

In Dexter's Laboratory, Dexter grows a beard to become rugged, and is believed to be his hero Action Hank. He later teams up with Action Hank to fight beard-themed villains, one of which is a chef with a beard that acts like a blade.

Louie (the seafood chef who sings "Le Poisson" from The Little Mermaid) is only evil insofar as aquatic animals are concerned. In context, that's evil enough. For bonus evil, he even has a twirlymustache.

A similar chef can be seen for a few seconds (although in shadow) in the earlier animated Disney film The Aristocats during the scene where Duchess, Thomas O'Malley, the kittens, and the Gabble sisters run into Uncle Waldo.

Skinner from Ratatouille isn't exactly dangerous, but he is greedy and sneaky and has an abysmal sense of business ethics.

There is also a story where Homer becomes a food critic, and the other critics tell him he gives too many good reviews so he starts insulting everyone's food (not just restaurants, but Marge, too). This makes the restaurant owners angry and a bunch of them get together to kill him with a poisoned eclair at a food fair. Most of the restaurant owners aren't normally seen in villain roles, but the French chef who appears (and is the main person behind the poisoned eclair) probably counts.

Mother Mae-Eye from the Teen Titans episode of the same name was sort of a supervillain version of the Wicked Witch in Hansel and Gretel. She initially appeared as a grandmotherly old woman, but her true form was a hideous old hag with warty, green skin and three eyes. She was able to brainwash the Titans into thinking she was their mother using the magical - and addictive - pies she made, all the while planning to turn them into one, and when found out, was able to grow to giant size and use them as weapons. One curious thing about her was that she can somehow hide inside her own pies (so to enchant a victim who tries to eat it) and when defeated, is trapped in one until, again, someone tries to eat it.

Nurse Claiborne, who first appeared in the Codename: Kids Next Door episode Operation: P.I.N.K.E.Y.E., was both this and a Battle Axe Nurse. A school nurse who seemed sweet and friendly, her apple crumbles were popular among the students, even Numbuh Two... Then it turned out that she was behind the mystery epidemic of pinkeye going around the school, simply so she could use the eye crust from her patients as topping for the crumbles. She escaped at the end of the episode, but didn't learn; her second apperence had her go into the cereal business by making the sweet bits from Rainbow Monkey dolls. Including one of Numbuh 3's most prized doll. Kuki was not amused. (On another note, Claiborne is one of the few villains who was regarded as insane even in-universe, which is hard to do, considering what the KND's Rogues Gallery is like; pretty much all of them would be labeled criminally insane if put into any remotely realistic context.)

Misc.

In Medieval times cooks were considered naturally inclined towards evil. Good cooks lured a soul into pleasures of gluttony, while bad cooks corrupted the body. Furthermore, kitchens were often depicted as images of Hell, where master chef ruled as the head devil while his assistants butchered innocent animals and roasted them on spits. As such, cooks were often stereotyped as cruel, slow-witted gluttons and brutes.

This could help explain, in part at least, the cruel, exceptional executionnote boiled alive in his own stockpot of Richard Roose, the cook of John Fisher, Bishop of Rochester, during the reign of Henry VIII. Roose was accused of attempting to murder his employer with poison in 1531(Fisher survived, but several guests weren't so lucky); Henry VIII pushed an Act of Parliament through which assigned this special penalty. It still isn't known if Roose worked alone, was paid off, or even if he was guilty at all(some historians think that it was due to fungal growth in either the ingredients or the stockpot).note Ironically, when Fisher would actually die four years later, it was due to Henry VIII-related causes

People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (Pe TA) tends to portray any chef who cooks with meat in this manner. Just take a look at their “Cooking mama” thanksgiving game.

Let's be honest: as kids, most of us thought the cafeteria staff at school were either this or Lethal Chefs.

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